When Japan’s Emperor Meiji passed away in 1912, the reign was passed to his son, whose historical period is now known as the Taisho era (1912-26). The pictorial movement in photography, which had already begun well over a decade earlier in the West, eventually found fertile soil in Japan and reached a peak during this time.
 
Today, fine specimens in all sizes of silver print and gravure may be found by patient collectors, and high-end gallery exhibitions of works by both known and anonymous artists have been held in recent years. Antiquarian dealers in Japan, and on-line sites dedicated to vintage Japanese photography sometimes offer fine images in this genre at prices reflecting similar values attached to the work of Western photographers.
 
What you are about to enter is an exhibit of some worthy images that, had they been found executed in large format as silver-gelatin prints, would not be in the authors’ collection, but rather in the high-end galleries of Tokyo, New York, or Paris.
 
Instead, they were all found at the bottom of (or the back of) boxes of picked-over Japanese postcards at various flea markets and paper shows over the years. Forlorn, dog-eared, and often scuffed, they fell outside the desires of the vast majority of buyers who were intent on cherry-picking the boxes for Geisha Girls in all manner of dress (and undress), Cherry Blossoms blooming in the Parks, and the colorful Street Scenes of Japan’s major cities that have been totally transformed by the ravages of earthquakes, fire, and war. Considering the fact that I had to wade through literally thousands of standard images to find even one of these shows that even then, the market for those moved by the softness of "pictorial art" was only a fraction of those moved by the more common photographic elements composed of boobs, blossoms, and boulevards.
 
The anonymous photographers, who seemed more intent on leaving us their misty visions of Japan rather than their names, somehow got obscure printers and publishers to issue meager runs of their photographs in postcard-size collotypes. After all, the Famous K. Ogawa (1860-1929) gained his fame more from the collotype images he published than from any silver-print work he ever did. So, why not great collotype images reduced to the size of a postcard that could be sent more places for more people to see?
 
Here the image size is meaningless and only the image content itself, illuminated like a large slide on the "light box" of your glowing screen, speaks for itself as art…or not.
 
I’d like to thank Alan Griffiths for making gallery space available for displaying some of these lost images by unknown Japanese photographers who stepped out into the fog, cold and damp to capture fleeting moments of "art" that, for whatever reason of the artists own choosing, wound up on the business side of humble postcards to be admired by the few that would see and appreciate them.
 
Rob Oechsle, Pennsylvania (February 2008).